Beloved rivals

Like all siblings, Jane and Anna Campion have had their ups and downs. Both are film-makers, Jane the more successful. It was always like that: Anna overshadowed by Jane. But when Jane's child died, their relationship came of age: so much so, they're now working together. By Suzie Mackenzie

If you were to draw the shape of sisters Anna and Jane Campion's relationship, it would resemble a diamond - starting at a fixed point, expanding outwards in opposing directions, before finally converging at a point some distance from where it began. Turn it around, stand it on end, expose it to the harshest scrutiny, and it will not change its shape. But fold it along one line of symmetry and you create a triangle, the model for the cardinal passion, jealousy - jealousy being always that furtive figure, the unwanted guest, attendant wherever you find love. Or bisect this diamond along its opposite sides and you have a parallelogram - tramlines, pairs of lines that run and never meet.

Contained within the figure of the diamond, then, is the pattern of all relationships, the map of the human heart. The potential for destruction, the potential for estrangement, the potential for harmony, for symmetry. Symmetry, the quality of being the same but different. Just like sisters, you could say - defined first by what they have in common, and then by what holds them discrete.

Jane, of course, is the more famous. Her work is an exploration of fascinating feminised spaces, of the limbo between sleep and wakefulness. It's there in films such as Sweetie (1989), a quirky tale of two unlikely sisters; or An Angel at My Table (1990), based on the autobiography of Janet Frame, New Zealand's most celebrated novelist/poet, who in her youth was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and spent eight years in an institution. There also in The Piano (1993), a romantic story about the will to live and to love framed inside a love triangle, which critic David Thomson described as, "A great film in an age that has nearly forgotten such things"; and in The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Henry James's novel of character-as-consciousness, in which a young woman who has dreamed only of freedom and nobility finds herself, in reality, ground in the mill of the conventional. These films have made her the foremost woman film director in the world. She has won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, for An Angel at My Table, the Palme D'Or at Cannes, for The Piano, and was awarded an Oscar for best original screenplay for the same film. As Anna says: "A huge achievement in a film world in which women get almost nothing."

Which makes Anna the less successful sister ... Well, yes and no. Yes, if we see Anna only refracted through the glass of Jane. Yes, if we take the image as reality, art as life; if we see the person as a marketable commodity defined only by the price it can raise. In other words, if we see the difference, ignore the symmetry.

Both have come a long way from New Zealand, where they began, and New Zealand, as they say, is a long long way from anywhere. (A funny symmetry here, too - New Zealand, a country defined by it relation to its big sister, Australia, its closest neighbour, a thousand miles away.) Both are in their 40s, married, and mothers of small daughters - Jane of Alice, four, and Anna of Eve, nine. Both are writers and film-makers.

Look, they used to hate each other. Hate, Jane's word. "We hated each other growing up. I hated everything about her, her competitiveness, I hated her." No mystery here. If rivalry is defined as competing for the same place, for the same part, then they were rivals for the role of daughter from the start. But listen. "We were very close as children," says Anna.

Pity the eldest child, never allowed to say, never to use, the word hate. How she must have loathed the little interloper, with her long tresses that mummy would iron every day before school to get it perfectly straight - because Jane couldn't possibly go to school with her hair curly. Jane preening and grooming herself all her life for notice. Jane, whose apprehension of the world placed herself always at its centre.

Do you need to be told she was cleverer at school, brilliant at sports, "good at everything". And Anna? "I entered a bubble, a fantasy world." She stopped competing, she let Jane win. Why? Because it's impossible to find a friend in a person who is in competition with you, and Anna wanted her sister for her friend. And now there is no competition. Jane has won.

I like their story, and I like it principally because it is Anna who has scripted its ending, the ending that they live with now. "We are friends." That's not to say that Jane, a statuesque beauty who giggles at every question posed her as though it is the obvious that strikes her as absurd, is not likeable. She is funny, she can laugh at herself.

She tells a tale of a recent visit to Rome with Alice and Eve, where Jane, who is one of life's great organisers, finds she has run out of knickers. "And I've always been one of those people who takes organisation as far as it goes. It's all very well having things in a drawer, but whereabouts in the drawer?" As they were going off to some poncy lunch, Jane confided in the girls: "No knickers on." "Don't worry auntie," Eve reassured her. "Mummy often sends me to school with no knickers."

And when I tell her that Anna describes her as ruthless, she sort of hums and says, mock-serious, "I knew we should have been doing these interviews together." But not ruthless, she maintains. "Persistent, fanatical, maybe. Ruthless implies that you'd hurt someone, and I wouldn't want to do that. Anyway, I don't know whose throat you'd have to cut in this business to get on. Your own, probably."

It is just that there is something extremely moving about Anna - a willingness to expose herself, to turn herself inside out, to throw herself at things and at people. She takes risks where people are concerned. If Jane is poetic, formal, controlled, Anna is transparent, frank. Jane may have the trait of persistency in her work, but it is Anna who is more dogged, more determined in regard to relationships, to those she loves. Jane can walk away from things, from people - as she walked away from Anna when they were in their 20s.

She left, Jane says, not New Zealand, not her family, but Anna. "Because I'd had enough. I was so sick of the fighting, the competition, I just wanted her to let me be." She could easily have walked away and not looked back. "Yes, absolutely." But Anna, she says, "wanted her sister back". So it is to Anna that she owes their friendship. "One of the richest friendships of my life. I love her. We love each other. I think I've come to understand that if you want friendships, then you have to be prepared to share things."

And not behave always like the privileged child, the preferred child, the possessive child, who affirms its individuality by seeking to possess others. Because wasn't it Jane, too, who would not let Anna be. Be herself, be different from Jane. There's that terrible scene in Sweetie, Campion's first full-length feature, when the father of the two girls observes, "I thought I brought you kids up to love each other." "A bit hard," Kay says harshly of Sweetie, "when she's in fairyland." And all that excess of emotion in Sweetie, so that even her death they take first for melodrama before realising how much they loved her. Jane dedicated Sweetie to Anna: "For my sister."

It began like this. First Anna and then Jane, 18 months apart, born in the same place, Wellington, New Zealand, to the same parents, Edith and Richard Campion, a wealthy, cultured couple, who used Edith's inheritance from her grandfather's shoe factory to start up a National Theatre Company. "In New Zealand terms, our mother was an heiress." Both use this phrase.

Both listened to the same parental stories - the meeting on the cable-car, the discovery that they were born on the same day of the same year in the same town. Curiously twinned, obviously meant to be, the little girls would have confidently thought. They must have shuddered with fear at their mother's story of being left an orphan at nine, and being brought up by governesses - both still talk of their mother's loneliness. Lucky to have each other, their mum might have told them. Not so lucky, each may have privately thought.

Who knows what they made of their dad's story? A son in a religious group called the Exclusive Brethren, allowed no radio, no books. Aged 14, he told them to stuff it and was banned furthermore from eating with his family. A heroic figure, then, their father. "Poetic," Anna says. "A bit of a Ted Hughes figure." So much in common already in their outer reality.

But here already a difference. Edith's first child, a son, had died at birth five years before Anna was conceived, so that Anna was greeted as a miracle baby: "Mum was so thrilled to see me, a strong, tantrumy little girl." Whose word is this "tantrumy"? The mother's?

So, all Jane had to do was define herself through difference. It's something you see in all siblings, but most particularly in siblings of the same sex. If Anna was difficult, Jane was good, but not meek. When they were teenagers, there was an occasion when Jane pinched Anna's bloke. "I didn't like him much, so I didn't mind," Anna says.

Perhaps she was always doing this, inventing excuses for Jane's behaviour. Of course, they were competing: for their parents' love. "Jane always wanted my father's attention. Well, he's a pretty interesting guy," and, as Anna says, "You don't compete together." These were parents often absent: their work took them away at night, and they were passionately committed to their project of a National Theatre. The mother acted - "She was quite good" - the father directed. The girls were left alone with a series of nannies. Anna developed asthma and then Jane did, too - "quite badly".

It began, Anna remembers, with one particular woman who looked after them: "We were very rigorously controlled by this woman, there was a lot of discipline." Each of them dealt with this differently. "I went into my head, into a fantasy haze where the real world didn't impinge. And that's when Jane got on to the idea of projects to save her. She was obsessed by the need to get everything right. She'd write these plays in which she took all the parts - king, servant, the lot. She'd control the projects to have the world appreciate her. Which she still does, really."

And so it went on. A brother, Michael, born seven years after Jane - so they were on their own, together, all those seven years - the father then saying to the mother, "You take the girls, I'll look after the boy." In the mid-60s, when Anna was 11 and Jane nine, the loss of the theatre company meant that their parents were around more. On a big trip to Europe, they visited the Yorkshire moors. How disappointing, Anna thought, that these scrappy little hills should be the place where Emily Brontï conceived Wuthering Heights. Jane fell in love with Italy and art, "the standard of excellence", nothing like what you get in New Zealand.

Most of the story described above is Anna's. Distant, secretive parents; unkind nannies; a father uninterested in his daughters; and a mother "who took everything personally". "I didn't like my childhood. It wasn't particularly wonderful and I never felt safe." Because she felt "threatened", she was "never adventurous", she says. "Not like Jane. I'd be wallowing inside my head and Jane would be out climbing Everest."

Maybe it's not odd that Jane's memory of her parents is completely different, but it does make you wonder about the facts. It's not the facts that matter, Jane says, it's what lies between the facts - that's where feeling, where meaning, is found.

"We've got different feelings about our parents. From what Anna says, she didn't have a good time. But I am very close to them both. I consider myself lucky to have them." Jane, confident, manipulative, reflecting back at her parents the image they wanted to have. Anna, more faltering, in her image of herself and of others.

In the end, both of them left. Jane first, of course, and later Anna. Jane for Europe and then Australia. Anna for London. Anna's reason for leaving? "My parents were well known in New Zealand, and it's a small place. It was always, These are the children of Dick and Edith.'" It felt like they were framed, displayed, surrounded by the tyranny of trifles in family life that bind one member to the next, but drown your own personality. Just as in The Piano, Ada almost chooses to drown, lost in the deception of the creation of her own character, before choosing life and language. A story, then, of constriction and liberation.

We can fast-forward the next years. University for Jane, reading anthropology; drama school for Anna, training to become an actress. Later, Anna trains as a psychotherapist. Then art school for them both. Jane telling Anna, you're not good enough. You're going to have to try a lot harder. Give up art. All those shared symbols are meaningless now. The future is in film. "That's what she was always doing," Anna says, "dragging me into the real world."There's one other detail that counts. In 1982, Anna met David and got married. Jane was her bridesmaid. "I think it threw her, me getting married. She was envious of me securing a relationship like that." But then, it was easier for her. "When you're driven like that, you just expect other people to trot along behind you. Most people don't want to do that."

Jane's acclaim came fast once she started to make movies. From Peel, her first short in 1986, to The Piano and great acclaim in 1993 - just seven years. She shared the Palme D'Or in Cannes (with Chen Kaige, for Farewell My Concubine). "And all hell let loose." Jane was a star.

Of course, I asked them both the predictable question. How did she cope with being superseded by her little sister? Sibling rivalry? Was Anna jealous? Sometimes, Jane said. Not really, Anna said. But these are not questions that have a relevance any more.

Nineteen-ninety-three was also the year that Jane's first baby died, a little boy she named Jasper. No, not a symmetry with her mother's experience, just one of the terrible things that happen to people. Two thousand babies die every year in Australia, Jane says - "I was just one of those people." What you have to imagine, Anna says, is that amid all those accolades, "all that success that she loved and which she had earned, she lost the thing she wanted most in the world. To have to hold in her head those two diametrically opposed experiences." It was at exactly this time that Anna secured the financing for her own first film, Loaded. She flew straight to Australia to be with her sister.

Jasper was beautiful, perfect in every way except that his brain had been starved of oxygen in the birth canal. He was born unable to sustain life. He was 10 days on a support machine. Jane took him home to die. Do you want to know about jealousy, about envy? About guilt? For Anna, to be the mother of a healthy child, and Jane to have none. For Anna to have to go to her sister, hold her, see her grief and know that it was immutable, and then to go home to little Eve tucked up in bed.I remember, some years ago, talking to novelist Margaret Drabble, who has a notorious rivalry with her sister, also a novelist, AS Byatt. It is commonly assumed that the rivalry is literary. But

I remember well Margaret explaining how the rift began when Byatt's son, Charlie, was knocked down and killed by a car - and the unassuageable guilt she, Margaret, experienced knowing that her own children were safe.

After Jasper's death, Jane was unable to do anything for months. But eventually she had to start work again, The Piano was made, there was a publicity tour to undertake, she had responsibilities to her cast and crew. Then the sisters did something extraordinary in its courage. When Jane set off on her international tour, she took Anna's daughter, Eve, just four, with her. Anna explains: "She wanted a little person with her. She thought it would help her." There was the risk, of course, that it would reinforce Jane's sense of loss. But who knows what miracles an act of kindness can create. Jane came back from the tour pregnant with her daughter. "Just six months after Jasper died. I wasn't expecting it. I was so lucky." There are pictures of her at the 1994 Oscar ceremony, heavily pregnant and aglow with joy. A lot of people must have assumed it was winning the awards (Holly Hunter won best actress, Anna Paquin for best supporting actress, and Jane herself for best original screenplay).

There was a point, she says, when she felt that she would never get over it. "I felt I had lost everything, and, in a way, it is everything: it is human life. To be alive when your child is dead. The reality of that is very clear to you, because you are sitting there holding a dead baby."

It cut a path to her heart and, in a way, recreated her. "Before Jasper's death, what I considered most important in life was love and relationships. Now I think it is all about responsibility. I want to acquit myself of my responsibilities to the people I love, and to do it well." Acquit herself, too, of her responsibility towards herself. "I am alive and my job is to go on living. I accept that." She learned also, she says, that every life, every death, belongs purely to one person: "That all lives are separate, even a very short life."

"I have come to feel Jasper's death as a blessing, as well. I honestly believe that the access to emotion and love that losing that baby has given me is a complete gift, and one that it will take me a whole lifetime to understand." The film she made next was The Portrait of a Lady, in which the heroine, similarly, loses her baby.

It is up to you whether you take Jane's word for it, but I believe her completely when she says that success holds little allure for her now beyond her professional pride in her work. As she points out, it was never really film that attracted her, "but the desire to understand the world through stories, through ideas". She won't read Hollywood scripts. She has no interest in mainstream cinema. "It's boring - I don't like its way of trying to please all the time, that's nauseating." In the ideal world, she says, she would make only films of which she was the author.

Which makes Holy Smoke, her new film, doubly interesting. She has written the screenplay with Anna. It is based on an idea that Jane had five years ago, after working with Harvey Keitel on The Piano, when Keitel said to her that he would like to work with her again. "What I like about Harvey is that, as an actor, he is like a female fantasy projection - animal, great masculine energy, and yet somehow sensitive. Lots of men would have been put off by how female-oriented The Piano is. But Harvey immediately identified it as a part for him."

On the plane on the way back to Australia, she came up with an idea. A young woman has been involved in a cult. Her family lure her back under false pretences for a meeting with a deprogrammer, a very successful, swaggering man. He then falls in love with the young woman but, in the process of this, has to place his entire personality, everything that he stands for, under scrutiny. He ends up, in a sense, deprogramming himself. "He has come to a point in his life where being successful is not interesting to him any more. It's not giving him what he wants."

It's the story of a journey of a person, a man, into his heart, the great mythic journey that, as Jane Campion says, "everyone should make". He couldn't have made it on his own. He needs, as she says, "an avenging angel".

So, the question must be, why undertake it with Anna? That's an easy one. The symmetry of life and art. Holy Smoke is an entirely fictional story, but its components, its elements, as in all art, are drawn from life, from the experiences of the person, or persons who make it. So, it is the same as life, you could say, only different.

There were, of course, practical considerations in them working together. Anna is better at relationships, and this is a story of a relationship. Anna is better, Jane says, at immersing herself in character. This is a story of immersion. Anna is better at personal risk-taking, and this is a story that suggests that real caring is seeing another person for what they are. Daring to say I don't like this about you. "The biggest risk of all," as Anna says. "They are like two stubborn locomotives travelling across a desert that bang into each other." And in the collision comes reconciliation.

Naturally, as sisters, as collaborators, they fought. They fought about the script, about who did what. About Jane giving Anna a lot of the hard work and keeping the good bits for herself. About Jane going off in the middle to make another film, leaving Anna to write most of the novel based on the same story - sitting in a room every day for months on end. But what they have ended up with is a love story. It's an unusual love story in that they do not become a couple.

"In that way," says Jane, "it's not a romantic story at all - they are present in each others lives, but apart." It is a quintessentially romantic story, says Anna. About two people who love each other, but who are secure enough in themselves not to have to possess each other. Two people who look at each other from afar, across oceans, and who see each other clearly. A good story with a happy ending about two unique people.

´ Holy Smoke, the film, is released in the autumn. The novel, by Anna and Jane Campion, is published by Bloomsbury, priced £14.99. To order this title at the special price of £12.99, plus 99p UK p&p, freephone CultureShop on 0500 600102.